Dr. Wei Chang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, SJU

Thursday November 3, 2016 (11:00 – 12:00)

The Sybil Attack and Its Prevention Techniques

Abstract: We are entering a distributed computing era, where various decisions are individually made at each entity based on the pervasive data from the other entities scattered all over the world. However, most distributed systems are vulnerable to Sybil attacks: by creating a large number of fake identities, an adversary can introduce a considerable amount of false opinions into a distributed system and subvert it. As a result, some entities may make unfair, or even false, decisions. For instance, in some distributed systems, critical resources are assigned based on voting results. If an adversary holds a considerable number of fake identities, he can easily change the overall decision, and unfairly gain more resources. It has been more than a decade since the first appearance of the Sybil attack. In this presentation, Dr. Chang will systematically show the evolution of the Sybil attack and its defense techniques.